One of the hardest problems new bloggers face is thinking up content to write about. I would say more time is wasted thinking about what to write than the actual writing. This is where a weekly event post can come in handy. Examples of this type of post include Shoemoney’s Free Shirt Friday, Michael Kwan’s What’s Up Wednesday and my Dot Com Pho. Having a post that recurs every week (or whatever set date) offers many advantages. In no particular order, here are some reasons why you should create a weekly event post. Feel free to add your own in the comments.
Fairly Easy To Produce Content
Creating a weekly event post doesn’t need a lot of work. Sure, the production time to produce an episode of Dot Com Pho is more involved than the average weekly event post. However, a free shirt Friday or what’s up Wednesday shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to write, especially when most of the contents (shirts and what’s up) are provided for you.
There’s no need to get fancy. Just decide on a recurring theme and post about it every week. If you can’t think up something as unique as a Dot Com Pho, then do what Jonathan Volk did and create a “Week In Review” post to list your best articles of the week. It’s easy to produce and adds more content to your blog.
It Gives Your Readers Something To Look Forward To Or Avoid
Having a weekly event post is like having a TV show. Your readers know when it’s going to happen and will either look forward to it or avoid it like the plague. Either way is good because it puts your blog in your reader’s mind and associates it with a particular event.
You should pick a day of the week for your event post and stick to it. Moving it around will create reader confusion. I know Shoe will show off a new T-shirt every Friday and I always look forward to seeing it. Because weekly event posts are easy to produce and mostly light reading, they’re generally posted on the weekends or start of the weekend. You want your best content on the heavy traffic days (during the week) and the recurring stuff during the week when traffic is low (weekend).
It Makes You a More Consistent Blogger
One of the biggest reasons for my blog’s success is my consistency. My blog has averaged two posts per day since it started and there has never been a single day in the blog’s life where there wasn’t at least one new post for readers to read. This level of consistency is very hard to keep up.
Having a weekly event post can help reduce the stress of producing a lot of content. It is hard to think up new things to blog about. However, I don’t have to worry about that on Saturday. I just need to bring my Panasonic GF2 digital camera and film what I’m having for lunch.
A weekly event post forces you to be a more consistent blogger. It’s very easy to delay that post “until tomorrow” and then delay it again. Pretty soon, you’ll go for weeks without a new post and then your blog will die. Even if you write no other articles, a weekly event posts will mean you will have at least one new piece of content every week, unless your Jonathan Volk. Then your week in review will be last week’s week in review post.